On the same day last September that Tony Abbott was elected prime minister with a mandate to stop the boats, three young men from Pakistan's violent disputed areas arrived in Indonesia.

Twenty days later the trio tried the people smugglers' route to Australia, but their boat foundered and they were brought back to Indonesia.

In January they tried again, but had the distinction of being in the first group returned on Australia's freshly purchased orange life boats. Now Mir Abbas, Haneef Hussein and Farman Ali accept they must wait years in Indonesia for resettlement through United Nation's processes.

But they have handed all their money to people smugglers and, like hundreds of others stopped in Indonesia by Australia's tough policies, can no longer afford the $200 to $300 a month it costs to buy food and pay rent. Indonesia does not allow them to work and their families - who sold land to get them this far - have nothing left to send.

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Their solution is to try to get into one of Indonesia's overcrowded and sometimes squalid detention centres.

These men know - because they talk to friends already in detention - that some of the 13 Indonesian immigration detention centres are "like prisons; you can't go out", says Haneef Hussein.

A Human Rights Watch report last year said the worst had inadequate food and poor sewerage, and flooded in the wet season. Guards were sometimes violent or extorted money from detainees.

The head of the UNHCR, Manuel Jordao conceded in a recent interview that the centres were "understaffed, overcrowded, staff lack training and regimes vary enormously".

Even so, the flow of asylum seekers into detention is becoming what Jakarta immigration spokesman Yan Wely Wiguna said was "a trend".

"It has never happened before that asylum seekers surrendered themselves to immigration detention."

Yan could not provide hard figures, but centres in at least two Indonesian cities had recently been hit by an influx of people seeking accommodation.

"They don't want to go to PNG and Christmas Island is closed, so they are stranded here," he said.

Mir Abbas and his friends know conditions can be shocking, but they've been told the the centres in Pekanbaru in central Sumatra, and Makassar in southern Sulawesi, are the best.

"They give freedom to go outside so I prefer to go there," Mir said.

But they do not know how they can get to those cities from their home in Cisarua, West Java.

According to Yan, the immigration department recently warned all domestic airlines not to allow asylum seekers to use their UNHCR cards as identification to board flights because "we don't want another MH370".

The asylum seekers are also worried that being inside detention will slow down their bids for interviews with the UNHCR for refugee status, because the agency has very few personnel in some Indonesian regions.

But they feel that they have no other choice. Recent figures show that more than 10,500 refugees and asylum seekers are registered and waiting in Indonesia for resettlement - mostly to Australia. They were granted visas at a rate of just 48 people a month in January and February this year. Every week in Jakarta, 100 new arrivals register with the UNHCR.